who? me, david? i confess i haven't read prynne. have read and seen and
heard more of cobbing's work. is there one book of prynne's i should not die
without having read? the way people talk about him is similar to the way
people in north america talk or talked about ashbery.
i don't know what a "conventionalist or a naturalistic conception of
language" would be, really. i read that cratylus, whom you mention,
advocated the idea that language is natural rather than conventional, which
would seem a rather naively essentialist or platonic approach. so then
'conventionalist'='nominalist'?
materialist or materialistic poetics, yes, i agree, has been around for a
while. but they can differ quite a lot amongst themselves.
perhaps essentialist/platonic/idealist materialistic poetics is divination
and the like.
ja
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 21, 2011 11:38 PM
Subject: Re: Better Books, for those who can recall...
> I'd still like clarity here. It can be very difficult when literary people
> use philosophical terms for reasons that would be uncharitable to mention.
> It would of course be absurd if it was being claimed that Prynne, or
> anyone
> else of recent vintage, were the first poet with a materialist philosophy.
> So, can I ask, is 'materialist poetics' being thought of in terms of a
> conventionalist or a naturalistic conception of language? Think
> 'Cratylus'.
> Road directions help.
> I don't have any problems with the description of the processes given ,
> I'm
> interested in the why.
>
> On 22 October 2011 04:40, Jim Andrews <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> disruption of syntax. disruption of the image. disruption of the audio
>> signal, of the media. cut up. cut together. algorithmic weaving together
>> of
>> the materials. disruption of semantics. the surrealists approached it as
>> automatism. oulipo approached it quite differently but they still share
>> this
>> materialist poetics of disruption/disjunction. the language poets
>> approached
>> it different from both the surrealists and oulipo but, again, the
>> disjunctive materialist poetics. disjunction. the disjunctive.
>>
>> and then the computer age. which assimilates these methods very
>> naturally,
>> even organically, into materialist poetics of the algorithic/processual.
>>
>> ja
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